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John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future'
- grawprog 6y ago>and it takes a long time, because they’re slow to trust, slow to really enter into communication with you – then you can probably imagine how they might philosophise.” >Gray believes that humans turned to philosophy principally out of anxiety, looking for some tranquillity in a chaotic and frightening world, telling themselves stories that might provide the illusion of calm. Cats, he suggests, wouldn’t recognise that need because they naturally revert to equilibrium whenever they’re not hungry or threatened. If cats were to give advice, it would be for their own amusement. Reminds me of https://youtu.be/AjFItQPBF3E https://youtu.be/AjFItQPBF3E
- kgwxd 6y agoI was 1:50 into that before I figured out how the British accents fit into the joke on this Key and Peele skit.
- grawprog 6y agoI don't follow. That was a clip of the Cat from Red Dwarf. A British sitcom from the 80's and 90's set in space in the far future.
- owyn 6y agoThat's the joke. :) Key and Peele could totally play Cat and Lister. But I'm surprised they never did a red dwarf tribute sketch now that I think about it, that would have been... something for sure. I loved that show!
- grawprog 6y agoI gotta admit, sometimes I take things a bit too literally on HN. But yeah, that would be pretty awesome. Never really thought about that before.
- BLKNSLVR 6y agoLive life for its own sake. The gift of life is life itself. What's the alternative? Twice in my life I've grasped the concept of death, and it made my heart race with an exhilarating feeling of suffocating claustrophobic for two reasons: 1. It's coming for me one day 2. Not just the lack of agency in the universe, but the lack of even the realisation of the lack of agency. All of this (wide sweeping hand gesture acknowledging "everything") is not just out of my hands but out of my awareness. Because I no longer exist. I no longer exist. Life is preferable to the alternative because it's at least something. A chance to experience.
- meetups323 6y agoReminds me of an experience where, my brain fully convinced itself for around 4 hours (felt much longer ofc) that I was an outdated Azure "SmartCodeCreator"[1] instance being deallocated for upgrades... it's a strange experience to embrace death. I haven't been the same since. [1] I had no name for it at the time, but that's the gist of it
- longdudefromnl 6y agoBeautiful
- koboll 6y agoThis is bitterly true but also profoundly, maddeningly, horrifically sad. Death is monstrous. We can do better. We have to do better. And it's tragic that we probably will but everyone alive today will probably miss that chance by a sliver. We happened to be born 99% of the way from the beginning of humankind to the end of death, but we just barely missed it.
- michaelwm 6y agoThere are as many ways to live, as many meanings to life, as many philosophies of the nature of things as there are beings in the universe. There's really nothing much to learn, because there are endless things to learn. One of my favorite comments on Hacker News was posted a few days ago. To quote: "On and on you will go, making sense of the world, forming notions of order, and being surprised in ways large and small by their failure, forever." — Albert Burneko on Wile E. Coyote: https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/how-wile-e-coyote-explains-the-world-1752248034 https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/how-wile-e-coyote-explains...
- unityByFreedom 6y agoDepends how detailed you want to get. All of us have a need to be social and creative, IMO, and Gray would say each sex has its own traits which do not necessarily hold all the time but can be instructive. I gathered this from his "Men are from Mars..." book.
- lol139189 6y agoNot the same John Gray.
- tomgp 6y agoYou’re thinking of the other John Gray
- unityByFreedom 6y agoHaha you're right! I did not know there were two. Pretty sure the Mars author is the better known of the two.
- tomgp 6y agoPossibly, though I only know the Mars/Venus guy because Amazon used to recommend those books based on the fact that is bought ‘Straw Dogs’
- 6stringmerc 6y agoCTRL+F "domestication" then "rats" Felines are only partially domesticated. From my research into the subject, including the article about the first cat skeleton found with no teeth, indicating humans had fed it, is that they only associate with us because of our habit of debris and sloppiness that attracts their prey. Otherwise, feral felines are still unrepentant killing machines that will try and trip you while walking up the stairs just to feed them so they'll stop yowling. Source: Personal experience with a feral kitten I have "domesticated" and would probably feed on my corpse for a few days if I trip and fall and die even though she's ~11 human years now.
- _jal 6y agoIt is a macabre topic, but cats and dogs don't need to be feral to eat your corpse if you die. Google around, it is not uncommon. For that matter, imagine you being trapped somewhere you can't care for yourself, with a corpse. What do you do? People have chosen both paths.
- theonemind 6y agoAll other disgusting factors aside, human meat must have some ridiculous concentration of all kinds of harmful things like mercury and all kinds of bizarre things.
- 6stringmerc 6y agoYC 2021 - Soylent Human Hummus - Do vegans taste better than omnivores? - ArsTechnica
- ericzawo 6y agoDon't even joke.
- octoberfranklin 6y agoshutupandtakemymoney.gif
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- gHosts 6y agoBollocks. My cats regularly imagine a future in which I'm going towards the fridge to provide them with food...... ...when the reality is I'm going elsewhere and just going to trip over them.
- serf 6y agoDifferent take : the cat is trying to coerce you into an early feeding, because it recognizes that you as an entity have the power to make such things happen for it.
- bredren 6y agoI think my cat can count to two. He only goes outside a leash, and we walk together 2-4 times a day. The harness has two plastic clips, and he will sit still until the second clip is secured. After that second sound, he will stand and walk to wait near the door.
- Kliment 6y agoCats can count to much more than two. If there are treats on a shelf and our older cat knocks them down, she'll remember how many hit the floor (from the sound) and then not stop looking for them until she's found that many. I suspect being able to keep track of distinct objects is useful when hunting if multiple small prey animals disperse in order to confuse the predator.
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- 0df8dkdf 6y ago>What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future For sure, however we can live in a created future, isn't that what DIY and maker culture all about?
- m0zg 6y ago> Don't live in an imagined future. Congratulations, dear philosopher. "Living in imagined future" is called motivation. You just told people that they shouldn't have any motivation beyond primitive impulses (hunger, fear, lust) such as those found in a cat. I'm not sure this is good advice for humans, however.
- llamaz 6y agoYou certainly seem to have a good understanding of how provocative his philosophy is. He doesn't believe that history is leading anywhere, that there's moral progress. He believes that in the future slavery might return because history is cyclical and a result of a corrupt human nature that has not changed for thousands of years. That means genocides, racism, etc are here to stay and whatever progress we've made is a coincidence.
- m0zg 6y agoI believe the Long Peace and technological progress put us at the dawn of the Golden Age, and we're living it right now, setbacks like COVID notwithstanding. Steven Pinker puts forward a powerful argument to that effect in "Enlightenment Now", and it's hard to disagree when you look at the data. Literally none of that would be even possible under this philosophical framework.
- tomgp 6y agoYeah John Gray and Steven Pinker exist at opposite ends of the spectrum on this one (eg https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-steven-pinker-wrong-violence-war-declining https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-stev... ). I think both perspectives are valuable
- m0zg 6y agoExcept Pinker's perspective is supported by data.
- guram11 6y agowe will always opt to view and live through our imagined future, it's how we issue priority in the plans and contingencies of our lives, the best we can agree is to spend more time living in the moment and not otherwise in a loop we call regret where the decisions(past) is being redo in our minds to better imagined outcomes(future)
- willis936 6y agoRight? It seems strange to call wisdom from a creature living in a simplified rule set. Throwing out imagined future necessarily throws out all of society and human knowledge.
- thinkingemote 6y agogray is not saying that at all.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoWe have learned a lot from cats. The foundations of deep learning were inspired by the research of cat brains. https://web.archive.org/web/20150709140148/http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1981/wiesel-bio.html https://web.archive.org/web/20150709140148/http://www.nobelp...
- xlm1717 6y agoI think this is a great interview and I will definitely pick up the book. I think the answer to "What can we learn from cats?" can be to live more like a cat. But to force disinterest in an effort to emulate a cat's apparent disinterest would be a mistake. To live more like a cat cannot mean to simply imitate the cat, that would be another ideology. Instead, it must mean that we have to follow our human nature, just as the cat follows its cat nature. I agree with John Gray's distrust of all ideology because ultimately ideology is what gives us the illusion that we can ignore our human nature. A cat must follow its cat nature, it has no choice. We as humans have a choice to follow our human nature or to try to bend nature to our will. The problem is that nature will always bend back, efforts to bend it will always be futile. So the ideal solution is to abandon ideology and choose to follow our human nature, to be the humans we are meant to be.
- thinkingemote 6y agoI think the central idea is that we need to be humble (like cats) and that hubris is dangerous.
- scandox 6y agoI'm totally open to Gray's arguments. Wide open. But I do find a some of his writing quite mediocre. I'm surprised by how highly he is regarded. I read Soul of The Marionette recently.and I thought it was a somewhat aimless and poorly written meander through other people's ideas. Had a bit of a Gell-Mann moment as well when he discussed Philip K Dick and I found his summation of Dick's ideas flat and lacking in insight: that was one of the writers on the book whose work I knew well.
- thinkingemote 6y agoI'm with you about Soul of the Marionette - aimless. But perhaps this article gives some hints as to his intention, to light a spark in our subconscious? Im not sure any lights flickered in my head reading that book though! I think he got very famous with the Straw Dogs and Black Dawn books (I've not read those). Recently he seems to be a columnist mostly ranting about SJWs and brexit - effectively a small c conservative pundit, but sometimes these contain a gem of a paragraph especially when talking about history or literature. I do like his ideas about the myth of progress and found it chimed with recent discussions about the hinge of history https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200923-the-hinge-of-history-long-termism-and-existential-risk https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200923-the-hinge-of-his... If the positive changes we have made are not inevitable and this moment in time is not the most important ever, how best should we act to make the best impact on the future?
- sadness2 6y agoI recently watched a video where three cats waited half a day by the door, waiting for their owner's return.
- keiferski 6y agoAll beings so far have created something beyond themselves. Do you want to be the ebb of that great tide, and revert back to the beast rather than overcome mankind? What is the ape to a man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just so shall a man be to the Overman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame. You have evolved from worm to man, but much within you is still worm. Once you were apes, yet even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes. - Nietzche The issue with this "only the present matters" shallow take is that the imagined future does matter in terms of the present. In other words, your imagined future influences your actions in the present, often to such a degree that it actually forms the future. If you discard these imagined futures, you end up with a "Eh, I have no agency anyway, why bother with difficult things?" and slide into an apathetic, presentist hedonism. The game is about constructing imagined futures which are productive and optimistic, not simply checking out entirely.
- peterwwillis 6y agoAlso, man is a laughing stock to the ape. "What are you doing without hair? Why so weak? Ugh, what is that you're eating?!" I can scarcely imagine what kind of unsustainable sacrifices the Übermensch will make in service to "progress".
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- bsenftner 6y ago> If you discard these imagined futures, you end up with a "Eh, I have no agency anyway, why bother with difficult things?" That's one take on the situation, the unreasonable other which all society depends (the inventor), sees a stupid, nihilistic future and gets to work to improve it, simply because there is nothing more interesting to spend one's time than elevating others in need, regardless of it having any meaning.
- keiferski 6y agoBut your definition of improve and elevating others is inherently based on your worldview and projection of imagined futures. You can’t escape the metaphysical horizon.
- brazzy 6y ago> In the last election he voted Conservative, persuaded in part, he says, by that need to get Brexit done, and laughing now at the delusional hypocrisy of “democrats”, who wanted a second referendum “without the option that people had voted for the first time even on the paper!” And there he loses all credibility. Very nearly everything that makes Brexit such a fiasco stems from the fact that "the option that people had voted for the first time" was not concrete and well-defined.
- bsenftner 6y agoIsn't this article "cat owner entertainment" and not serious? Well, not really.
- acd 6y agoAlso learned from cats: Should be read like a metaphor - Always land with your feet down when falling.